The Beekeeper's Promise (Page 13)

Mireille came home for Christmas and Eliane was grateful for her sister’s presence, which went some way towards filling the gap left by Mathieu, who had returned to spend a week with his father and brother in Tulle.

At the mill house, the family were preparing their usual Christmas feast. Mireille turned the handle of the mincer as Eliane fed in morsels of home-raised pork, seasoning the minced meat well, before the sisters wrapped patties of it in a lattice of caul as fine as lace to make the tasty crépinettes that would be fried and served at the start of the meal. Lisette was preparing the capon for the oven, and before long the house began to fill with delicious smells of roasting meat.

‘I wish you would reconsider, Mireille,’ said Lisette, as she scooped potato peelings into a bucket for feeding to the hens later. She was worried about her elder daughter continuing to work in Paris now that the country was officially at war with Germany. But Mireille dismissed her concerns.

‘Honestly, Maman, life goes on the same as ever. Our wealthy clients are still ordering couture; the cafés and shops are all open and it’s business as usual. They’re calling this the drôle de guerre – it’s a joke as nothing at all is happening. Perhaps the Nazis realise they’ve gone far enough and will begin to think again.’

That winter was a bitterly harsh one – the coldest in living memory for even the most elderly inhabitants of Coulliac. On a day in early January, when the surface of the river had frozen as hard as iron and the weir had become a sheet of pure white ice, Gustave went to the barn to start up the truck and warm the engine. It was time to drive Mireille to the station now that her holiday had come to an end.

Lisette could scarcely bear to let her elder daughter go. ‘Take care of yourself, Mireille, won’t you?’

‘Don’t worry, Maman. I’ll be fine. You know I love my work – and besides, what would I do if I came back here? Sewing curtains and letting out waistbands would bore me rigid.’

She turned to hug Eliane. ‘Look after them all for me,’ she murmured and Eliane nodded.

After Mireille had left, Eliane walked up the hill to check the beehives and smiled when she saw how the bees were keeping their queen warm by clustering together around her and shivering their bodies to generate heat. As she put extra supplies of sugar into the hives to give the bees the extra energy they’d need to see the colonies through until spring arrived once more, she said to herself, Perhaps the weather has frozen the war and not just the land. Glancing northwards, she spared a thought for the soldiers who held the Maginot Line, defending France against the possibility of a German attack, and as she did so the chilblains on her own toes burned and itched in sympathy with them.

Abi: 2017

‘So that’s your first wedding out of the way,’ Sara says. It was a successful one, by all accounts, even though one of the bridesmaids had overdone the pre-event Prosecco while helping the bride get ready and had tumbled, spectacularly, down the main staircase when making her grand entrance. Luckily, she’d been at the front of the bevy of bridesmaids preceding the bride and so hadn’t taken anyone else out on her way down. Equally luckily, she’d been in such a relaxed state when she fell, that – apart from a few nasty bruises and a rip in the skirt of her dress – she hadn’t done any serious damage to herself. Karen and Sara had helped her into the library, where they’d laid her on a sofa in the recovery position with a bucket beside her head, and I’d sat with her for a while until she’d suddenly come to. Hearing the strains of the party coming from the barn, she’d tottered off to join the dancing, once I’d made her drink a large glass of water and pinned together the tear in her dress as best I could. I’d had a quick word with Karen and she went to tell her husband, Didier, who was behind the bar, not to serve the girl anything alcoholic for the rest of the evening. She’d appeared for breakfast the next morning wearing a large pair of sunglasses but apparently none the worse for her tumble.

Sara and I are cleaning windows, which are thrown open to allow the fresh air to erase the lingering smells of perfume and aftershave left by the bedrooms’ recently departed inhabitants. The warm breeze replaces the harsher, chemical odours with the heavenly scent of the wisteria, whose trailing clusters of flowers drip from the pergola covering the terrace beneath where we’re working.

‘How are you finding the work?’ Sara asks.

I polish the last smudges off the pane of glass I’ve been cleaning. ‘I love it. I don’t think I’m quite ready to face a whole crowd yet, but I’m fine doing the behind-the-scenes stuff, if that suits you and Karen.’

She nods, wringing out a cloth into a bucket of soapy water. ‘Don’t worry – we’re not going to chuck you in at the deep end straight away. Take your time. You seem to be picking everything up really quickly and it’s a great help to us all having you here. Now, if you give the mirror and tiles in the bathroom a polish, I’ll start next door.’

I try to finish the job as quickly as I can so that I can catch up with Sara and ask her to tell me more of the story of Eliane, the girl who, like me, once lived in the mill house and worked at the château. As I clean, I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror. My cheeks are still sunken and the bruised-looking skin beneath my eyes appears even darker in the bright overhead light. But there’s also a faint flush of colour across my cheekbones and my collarbones don’t stick out quite as sharply as they did before. The regular meals of fresh, hearty food, which I’ve been helping to prepare and serve up three times a day, are doing me good. As I rub the glass vigorously to make it shine – the energy that Sara and Karen bring to their work is catching – I notice that my suntanned arms are shaped with a new, muscular definition. I like the new-found feeling of strength this gives me.

At the end of each day, once supper has been cleared away, I walk down the hill to the mill house and sit for a while beneath the sheltering canopy of the willow tree, watching the darkened river flow quietly by. Those moments of utter peace are balm for my soul and soothe away the tension in my body and the anxiety in my head, which I’ve carried with me everywhere I go for so many years. When I climb the wooden stairs to my attic room at night, my muscles ache with the satisfying tiredness of physical labour rather than the shooting pains of chronic stress. And then, lying beneath the veil of the mosquito netting, softly lit by moonbeams, I drift into a calmer, deeper sleep than I’ve known for a very long time, kept company by the murmuring of the river and the softly hooted conversation of the owls in the trees along the riverbank.

Only once in the past week have I woken in the darkness gasping for breath, shaken by one of the nightmares that used to surface every night. I’d panicked even more when I couldn’t think where I was for a few moments. But then the fluting song of a bird called me back, reminding me that I was safe beneath my veil of netting and that I’d survived another night with dawn about to break.

And it’s funny, but the more Sara tells me of Eliane’s story, the more I seem to feel the ghost of her comforting presence, too, calming me and watching over me in the attic room.

Eliane: 1940

The anti-climactic Drôle de guerre or ‘Phoney War’ continued as – at last – the bitter winter gave way to spring. In April, the plum and cherry trees burst into exuberant clouds of white blossom and the bees resumed their busy to-ing and fro-ing, as the colonies in each of the hives began their annual expansion. Eliane loved to watch the way the returning worker bees would weave their dance steps to tell their comrades where they had found the best sources of nectar. Observing closely, she noticed the way the dancing changed as the fruit trees began to drop their flowers like falling snow and the acacias donned their own snowy draperies for May Day. This was a critical time for the first collection of the year: in a few weeks, she would take the combs filled with pure acacia-flower honey and extract their sweet harvest, which was as pale and clear as champagne.

In the fields, a foam of meadowsweet and ox-eye daisies hid shy purple orchids. But the bees knew they were there and they danced their coded minuets to tell their co-workers where to drink from the secret caches of precious pollen and nectar.

Mathieu was kept busy in the vineyard, ploughing between the vines to keep the weeds down and tying in the burgeoning shoots as they reached out along the trellis of wires that in the fullness of time would support the heavy bunches of grapes. But in any spare moment he had he would walk over to the mill house to see Eliane. On the first day of May, the traditional workers’ holiday, he arrived bearing a newspaper parcel of wild mâche, which he’d gathered among the vines, and a bunch of lily-of-the-valley. Half of the flowers he presented, wordlessly, to Lisette, and he gave the rest to Eliane.

Lisette lifted the sprigs to her face to inhale their sweet scent. ‘Ah, les muguets,’ she sighed. ‘Thank you, Mathieu, I’m sure they will bring us luck.’

It was a beautiful day outside and Eliane had packed a picnic into her wicker basket. She and Mathieu picked their way across the weir and then wandered a little way along the riverbank on the far side. Mathieu spread a rug in the shade of a wild cherry tree that grew at the side of the meadow and lay down alongside Eliane as she set out the things for their lunch. He stretched his strong limbs, enjoying the unaccustomed midweek rest and the sensation of the sunlight dappling through the leaves. He squinted up into the branches and smiled. ‘It’s going to be a good year for the fruit.’ He pointed upwards and she glanced at the clustered bunches of green cherries that were just beginning to blush with colour here and there where the sun’s ripening rays brushed them.